In memoriam, 2012

The following words comprise the eulogy I shared with family and friends who came to my dad's funeral on June 17, 2012.


My father loved stories.     The long and adventure filled life that he lived gave him ample material for the telling of stories that brought to life the mid 20th century world of Paranday, Trujillo, and Lima that had shaped him and defined him.    To everyone and everywhere my father went in his life, down to his last days in convalescence in Montebello, he brought a bygone Peru with him.  

As a child I loved to listen to his stories.   They were sometimes ironic, occasionally shocking, often hilarious, and always very human.   As an adult, I learned to understand that for my father telling stories was how he made his way  in this world.   He befriended people from all walks of life through his stories and every friend he made could both learn his old stories and experience the chance to make new stories with him.

Of course, the greatest story of my father’s life was his relationship to my mother.    During their many years together, my mother brought and sustained a perfect love into this imperfect man’s life.    Her love was transformational:   it softened him, calmed him, challenged him, and changed him.    All his life my father remained a man of his place, time, and circumstances---with all the good and bad that came with that.    But as he told me many many times:  he became a far better, much stronger, and spectacularly luckier man for having my mother in his life.    In acknowledging this fact, my father illustrated to me the redemptive power of my mother’s love for him.  

After his beloved Edo died two years ago, there were related but different things that he in turn taught me.   While he and I lived together my father showed me how much he loved life.    My father’s love of life, that quality that most likely attracted my mother to him fifty years ago, was something he exemplified to me during the last two years of his life in ways I had not seen before.

My father faced his terminal illness and his death with a quiet and resilient courage.    During his last three months, when he was hospitalized and while he was still lucid, he told his life stories to his nurses, his rehab therapists, and all who visited him.    Even while profoundly ill, he still loved to laugh, he still loved to make people laugh, and he still thought of a better future.   

One of the last things he ever said to me, in a moment of clarity that broke through the cruel confusion that his illness had trapped his mind in, was a simple word:   hijito, spoken in happy recognition.   To me, whether coming from my mother or my father, hijito was and will always be most beautiful word in the Spanish language.   

Even though my father is now gone, I will cherish forever the memory that I was his and my mother’s hijito.

The love they expressed in this word is the love I will carry in my heart for the rest of my life.

The Long Bus Ride Home

Looking back years afterwards I sometimes ask myself if it only stood to reason that the worst moment of my childhood, an abject personal lesson in where my individual breaking point for public humiliation actually lay, was destined to find its nexus in the intersection between dusty metal contraptions, splattered transmission oil, the obliviousness of a self absorbed father, and a long bus ride.

Growing up I experienced my father as a man who talked his dreams out. To him, sharing his dreams aloud was really a way of both insisting on how they could come true and an affirmation of why those should come true. In the initial weeks after he left Peru to come live with us in Pasadena at age 52, my immigrant father groped through what must have seemed to him like many empty hours, since several months eventually passed by before he landed his first paying job in California.

With all that spare time on his hands he somehow learned that my 12 year old cousin Vicky owned a little store bought portable fan. “Do you remember Vicky’s fan?” he asked me one afternoon, apropos of nothing that he’d been talking to me about right then. “Yes” I answered. “I can make one better” he said. “Really?” I asked, trying to buy even a few seconds worth of additional time to guess what response he wanted from me. “Just watch,” he said.

That same weekend he scrapped together one incidentally recycled electrical cord, a minor haul of spare copper wire, strips of white plastic, and other assorted industrial looking odds and ends. After hours of working with eyebrow furled concentration, he proudly displayed to me the culmination of his minor dream’s creative result: a working miniature plastic fan that blew forward a Kennedy fifty cent coin’s radius of air wherever it pointed. “Es muy bueno” I said to him solemnly: it is very good.

My father’s nano of a ventilating device was exactly as practical as its diminutive form factor suggests. Even so I surmised the improvisationally created fan offered him a necessary sense of mechanical accomplishment. This conviction was likewise reinforced when my clearly restless father spent several weekdays sawing out a chunk of our family station wagon’s plastic dashboard so that he could then affix on to it a rectangular row of five different colored blinking electric lights. Although these painstakingly installed lights served no practical function, at night they lit up the dashboard’s bottom forty percent like the DNA strand of a Christmas tree. My father evidently needed technical accomplishments that made him feel useful, even as these particular dashboard lights and the hobbit scale fan fell completely on the ornamental side of the form versus function divide.

My father did not limit the scope of his mechanical aspirations to his own activities. In a classical paternal posture, he projected his career fantasies directly on to me. One of my father’s first such ambitions for me grew through many mental meanderings from him as we spent hours together on the blacktop asphalt of different Pasadena streets, repairing other poor people’s old broken down, busted ass cars. I mentally traced one specific fantasy take shape as my father morphed into the free lance auto mechanic of last resort for other local impoverished immigrant families.

“You should” he began intoning to me as the months had gone by while we became increasingly immersed in consecutive weekends of fixing jalopies “move to Peru for about two years and learn how to fix diesel truck engines.” He often cleared his throat at the end of similar declarative sentences to me and did so on these numerous occasions. “Then you will come back here a prestigious master mechanic and you can charge what you want to work on diesel trucks.” “Just say the word,” he often added “and I will tell your mother to start making the necessary arrangements for you to travel to Peru right away.” My standard response was to murmur non committal “Hmmm mms” and hoped he would not demand more from me to demonstrate satisfactory enthusiasm for his latest projected fantasy on to my sixth grade existence.

I did think through the implications of my father’s aspirational goal for me. At age 11, under his prospective pitch, I would relocate to Peru alone for two years or so and apprentice myself to work on diesel truck engines. Not knowing a soul in Peru, leaving my entire known family for twenty four months, dropping out of the American educational system, speaking a shaky pidgin Spanish, possessing close to zero mechanical aptitude, and already depressed regarding the whole notion of combustible engine repair as an endeavor to waste away my remaining childhood years to say nothing of having that become an imposed lifetime career choice were all no impediments to my father’s dream calculus.

Then, by the logic of his same calculus, I would import myself back from darkest Peru and come back as an informally certified teenaged diesel engine “mechanico”, supposedly qualified to rake in a lucrative career selling my services out to all those large truck companies out there just chomping at the bit to hire 13 year old self proclaimed diesel engine mechanics trained in how to service decaying and unroadworthy Third World commercial trucks that in real life the California Highway Patrol would impound as road hazards if a Chip ever actually saw one of those belching monstrosities on an American freeway. Si, Papa. Just tell me right where to sign up for that.

Such were the projected imaginings that I had to endure from my father on an ongoing basis through the balance of my adolesence. Yet, in a very real sense, the fantasies he spent so much time impressing on to me were themselves mere vehicles for his most externally obvious compulsion: his endless need to talk. No matter the place, the social context, or the people he found himself around, the man’s verbosity was a pit that knew no bottom. Talking was oxygen for him, a fact that stayed bedrock true for the thirty years I have known him, despite all the physical and circumstantial changes he has experienced in the intervening three decades.

The content of what he talked about varied greatly, especially in the ‘80s and early 90s when his mental agility was still in its middle age prime, but the one constant was that he needed continuous attention, preferably of the deferential kind, which my mother lovingly gave him and which me and my younger brother grudgingly yielded to him because my mother’s life choices resulted in the cumulative effect of us having been drafted in to doing so. Listening and keeping our mouths shut except to mew several words of passive concurrence were the keys that unlocked the kingdom to my father’s all too tenuous and momentary contentment.

Certainly my dad did not brook actual disagreement from me or my younger brother, preferring us to play the role of a captive audience to his stentorian oratory. In this we were not unlike an ad hoc two child Reichstag assembly charged with genuflecting before our very own Peruvian Furhrer. I suppose this is an appropriate enough metaphor since among other bizarre theories he held, in his opinion Adolf Hitler had been a great man.

So it was that on yet another sunny Pasadena afternoon from my middle school years he and I found ourselves driving to one of our jalopy rigging appointments. My father started talking at length about restoring to road worthy condition an abandoned 15 year old shell of decaying metal and plastic that had once been a cheap Japanese econobox station wagon but which presently had no engine, no transmission, no tires, cracked windows, rotted out upholstery, and all in all no objective reason for being anything but junkyard scrap.

“Do you think we can fix it?” he asked me point blank.

I made the mistake of responding honestly: “No, it wouldn’t be worth it even to try.”

“You’re a pessimist!!!” he roared at me the instant these words escaped from my mouth.

“A man should never be a pessimist!” he bellowed again as he stared at me disdainfully while he should have kept his eyes on the road in front of us. “What kind of man are you? Or are you still a boy?”

I knew enough not to answer this particular question. I was about 12 years old then but I would have risked him (even while driving and all) literally slapping me down as a little smart ass right where I sat if I replied to him the obvious fact that I was a joven, Spanish for youth, neither a boy nor a man. Of course, he wanted only to impress upon me that being a “man” meant agreeing with him about fixing that self evidently defunct vehicle, but now I could hardly say that to him again without agitating him further.

I consequently said nothing more and as he filled the empty air between us with his outrage at the notion of limits on what a "man" should be able to accomplish with barely coherent ruins of metal and plastic, I reflected on the fact that my answer to his question had obviously offended not only his sense of order (he pontificates to me transparent bullshit and regardless of what I actually think in response I then intellectually prostrate myself) but also the power of his life’s vision to will that decrepit bucket of nuts and bolts into something worthy of his ingenuity and applied resources.

When I was a young adult I read a newspaper article that helped me understand my father’s loud ravings that long ago afternoon. This article described how poor people in developing countries often seek to buy American secondhand clothes that start as individual donations to local charitable organizations like the Salvation Army. The article detailed how local used clothing brokers letter grade donations for quality on a scale of A through D.

Only those donated used clothes graded as “A” quality ever actually make their way to local thrift stores. In contrast, donated clothes graded B, C, and D are resold in bulk to international clothing brokers. These brokers in turn repackage, ship, and resell said donated attire to people in developing countries who regard these recycled threads as highly desirable.

In reading this article I was struck by something an African secondhand clothing retailer said in response to the question of why anybody would want clothes as faded and careworn as the castoff materials received there from here. “In America, you waste so much,” he was quoted as saying. “In Africa we use everything there is. We do not waste a thing.”

This man’s words still resound in my memory. We do not waste a thing. The Peru of the Great Depression years my father was born into and raised in had been the geographical embodiment of those words.

My father’s life experience in this regard was partly illustrated by a story he related to me several times about the day before he was scheduled to start the second grade in Peru. In my father’s narrative, his godfather (who raised him when my paternal grandfather died prematurely) took him aside that morning before his first school day and decreed to him words along these lines: “Here is exactly one pencil. This pencil is the only one I have money to buy for you, so you have to make it last the entire school year. Take excellent care of it. God have mercy on you if you lose it.”

My father recounted that later the same day he contemplated this solitary pencil alone by his 7 year old self and was struck by the thought that he had to safeguard it for the nine months of the upcoming school year. The questions bubbled anxiously in his head: “What if I lose it?” “What if it gets stolen?” The proverbial light bulb then lit up inside his grade schooler noggin. A way to insure himself against the prospect of losing the pencil had occurred to him. He promptly snapped the pencil into two roughly equal halves, whereupon he congratulated himself on having figured out a way to improvise a “backup” half of the pencil in case he lost the “main” half.

His self congratulatory mindset lasted until the following day when his godfather demanded from him that he produce the pencil. “Show me the pencil,” his godfather growled. “I want to see how well you are taking care of it.” My father had no alternative but to hold out the cracked pencil for direct inspection. “OH MY GOD!! And AFTER I just told you that it has to last you for a whole year!!!” was the verbal part of his godfather’s response. The physical response followed shortly thereafter. It constituted a beating my father could still recall with gallows humor forty years later.

It was in part against this autobiographical backdrop that my father railed to me about what an offensively unimaginative pessimist I was for not seeing how or why the decayed station wagon he trumpeted could not be salvaged and worse, that it was not even worthwhile to try. The deeper truth for me was that I did not care one way or another if he or anyone else wanted to resurrect automotive corpses, except for the fact that I understood in advance one specific consequence like I knew my own name: that my father would expect me to spend every minute humanly possible next to him for God knew how many hundreds of hours trying to salvage that wasted shell of a vehicle.

Every degraded lug nut, rusted out bolt, worn connecting wire, every drop of muddy engine oil, every breath of oxidized gasoline smell, every single little derelict thing about that derelict shit piece hulk would become my temporary universe writ small. Worse, I also knew that every second of every minute of attempted vehicular resurrection would be performed to a noxious soundtrack dominated by my father’s temper tantrums, conceits, and bullying. I furthermore understood that my father placed exactly zero weight to even the possibility that I could or would have an independent thought or feeling about having to sink my own time and life in to this or any of the junkyard salvage operations that he so profoundly lusted for.

As events turned out, my father never did try to fix up that particular old station wagon carcass. My father’s auto resurrection mega project fell by the wayside as his time and energy became consumed by other jobs and work circumstances that came along. I was grateful for the reprieve from this particular dead project. I wasn’t always so lucky.

Three years and countless car repair projects later, by which time I had turned 15, my relationship to my father largely still took place through the prism of those jury rigged fix it jobs. One July summer morning my dad drove me out to an all day assignment in a distant western quadrant of Los Angeles. This particular job involved changing a truck’s clutch, which due to the nature of the work involved was always one of the grimiest and smelliest kind of undertakings that we could attempt on a vehicle.

Six long hot hours under the L.A. summer sun later, the transmission job was complete, as was my physical transformation. By the time my father said we were finished for the day I had turned into a walking urban scarecrow. My face, hands, arms, jeans, and shirt were streaked with engine and transmission oil grease. I reeked of gasoline, engine rust, human sweat, and nothing short of a twenty five minute shower was going to have me looking and smelling like a normal person again.

As I gathered and cleaned up the usual wide flung nebula of dirty repair tools strewn over the isolated concrete slab where we had been working, I was looking forward to that shower when my father unexpectedly handed me a five dollar bill. “Take this,” he said. “What’s this for?” I asked. “I don’t have time to drive you home,” he replied. “Its late and I have to drive straight to work from here, so you will take the bus home.”

My mind raced when I registered his words. It was about 4 in the afternoon as we had this conversation. My father worked a swing shift from 5 to midnight as a janitor in Northridge, which was about a half hour drive from our current location. He was correct in saying that he had no time to drive me back to Pasadena. So the bus, that most public of moving wheeled rectangles, would indeed have to do. And there was the rub: I needed to undertake the two hour bus ride across 20 miles of Los Angeles county all the way back home while unshowered from the day’s work, still wearing soiled ripped clothes, and smelling like a vat of used Pennzoil.

“You can’t be serious, you punk of an old man…” I thought as I tried to mentally picture taking the bus home in my disastrous physical state. “…I look and smell worse than a homeless person!” Of course, not being a mind reader, my telepathically transmitted thought failed to penetrate my father’s brain. In fact, he did not so much as turn around to say good bye as he promptly climbed into his work truck, keyed the ignition, and rolled his vehicle off the driveway to start heading for Northridge.

And with that I was left to make my way home alone.

The sun still hung high and bright above the horizon in the late afternoon hour as I started walking to the nearest bus stop, some five long city blocks away. This being July, no timely dusk would creep over the landscape to help see myself way home in a less visually conspicuous way. I fixed my eyes on the concrete sidewalk beneath me as I started walking but I still felt people’s eyes on me as I passed them by.

While I navigated the sidewalk, I was grateful that I was in any one person’s line of sight only for a handful of seconds. But I knew the two impossible to avoid different bus stops and bus rides awaiting me would offer no similar respite from bystanders contemplating my physical state. I only hoped to make it back in the least humiliating manner possible.

About an hour later I had just boarded the second bus and taken my forward facing seat when a young adult man with fair skin and a mustache sat down some six feet away from me in the front section of the bus where the seats were traversed and face each other from either side of the bus. He seemed nice enough and his presence did not increase my already heightened anxiety level, so I was grateful for that.

An elderly white lady with watchful eyes who was already sitting when the young man took his seat started talking to him. At first the words of their conversation did not register with me, but then I heard the old woman distinctly say “I remember when this city used to be clean.” She paused for a brief second during which I physically and mentally cringed.

“I remember,” she continued with her face now turned directly toward me and her eyes fixed on mine “when this city didn’t have so many dirty people walking around in it.”

I felt the bottom fall from underneath my stomach, stayed silent, and looked away. The young man stiffened and didn’t say anything in response. The old woman started talking to him about something else. When my bus stop came some 20 minutes later, I slinked off through the rear doors to avoid having to walk past either of them.

I finally arrived at my destination. The last sun rays from the evening dusk still filtered through the window curtains of my grandparents’ house when I sat down to eat dinner. My mom and grandparents had made it home before me. The minute I walked through the front door I took my desperately needed shower. I successfully washed off the oil and grime but several minutes later, when I sat down in the dining room and tried to eat the plate of Nona’s food she had prepared for me, I started showering tears of my own right onto my dinner.

The flowing tears burned from the public shame and humiliation of the day, the countless other days before like it, and the unimaginable number of future similar days awaiting me.

As I sobbed over my dinner plate I glimpsed through the corner of teary eyes my grandfather, my papasito, the most dignified man I had known in my entire life, take a seat next to me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked intently and calmly.

“You don’t look like you are enjoying your dinner,” he added wryly.

I let out a small laugh but my body was still wracked with sobs. “What happened to you?” he asked.

I couldn’t bring myself to explain anything to him, so I buried my head in my hands and didn’t respond.

“Everything is going to come out well,” he said to me. “You will see.” This was ten more words than my legendarily taciturn grandfather sometimes said to anyone in whole entire days. He shook his head sadly, patted me on my shoulder, and left the table.

Several minutes later my mom and Nona walked into the dining room and hovered over me. Having raised me, they knew I hardly ever cried.

“Que paso, hijito?” my mom asked me gently, as she placed her hand on my heaving shoulders, what’s wrong, my son?

“I-I-I took the bus all the way home dirty.” I stammered, with my head still locked between my arms. It hurt too much to even look up. “All the way from Los Angeles.”

“Your father sent you home on the bus from Los Angeles after working all day?” Nona asked. Nona and my mom knew what I looked and smelled like after a full day fixing cars.

I nodded my head yes.

“Its too much, mama.” I added, turning towards her. “Its too much.”

Her eyes locked with mine in response. She understood. As much as I loved her, which was more than anyone in my life, my mother and I both knew all the nightmare moments from my father that had culminated in the emotionally shattered state she now saw me in had one necessary precondition: her capitulation.

After protecting me and my younger brother to the best of her ability for the first ten years after we had been born, from the day he walked back into our lives my mother had given our father complete license to treat us exactly the way he wanted. This resulted in there being barely any aspect of our world that our father had not denigrated or otherwise devastated from the relentless ferocity of an alpha personality that asserted itself through interpersonal intimidation, was larded with immigrant rage, and deeply saturated in a paternal guilt that had nothing to do with us and everything to do with our half siblings he had effectively abandoned in Peru.

Our grandparents, uncles, aunts, family friends, even our adolescent cousins knew who and what my father was. Everyone saw the blatant and demeaning verbal and emotional violence he directed towards us. They all understood that as his children we were defenseless from his cruelties and his utter indifference to our mental and emotional well being. They all had at least an idea that the hot, dirty, unending vehicle repair work he had tasked us with for five years by that point in time was a mere external metaphor for the ways his applied notions of fatherhood devoured our lives outward from within our very insides.

In spite of this universal family consensus, my mom was the one person who could have decisively protected us from any or all of it. She and she alone could say the necessary words and take the necessary actions to shield us from the worse angels of our father’s nature. But incredibly to everyone who knew what a committed and loving mother she was, she had not done so. Leading up to that July evening in 1987, she had not once raised her voice in protest against our father’s malice.

“Its going to change,” she said quietly as my cascade of tears finally subsided. “Its going to stop.”

I wanted desperately to believe her words but I could not see how she would be able to stand against what had become nothing less than a force of nature. I intuitively understood that her and my grandparents’ graceful presence constituted the salve that was cauterizing my emotional lacerations from the harrowing day and I was grateful to them for this. What I could not see was my mother finally asserting herself to protect us from him.

Even through the doubts swirling in my mind I knew something else that I didn’t yet possess the ability to put into words. What my mother, Nona, and Papasito had poured into me all my life—their dreams, care, decency, compassion, and love—had solidified into an inner foundation of personal resilience that though incredibly stressed still held true, even under the total weight of my father’s depravities. But I needed my mother's help. I had needed it all along.

True to the promise she made me, my mother stopped capitulating that day. In her own determined and resolute way, she started standing up to my father on behalf of myself and my younger brother. In doing so she showed us all a love tough enough to take on an old man’s rage and a toughness smart enough to overcome his disbelief at being defied. It was the beginning of a long and brutal battle of wills between them and merits a telling all its own. The stakes were high because my mother was fighting for our ability to forgo the endless car fixing so that me and my brother could focus on our educations, which is another way of saying my mother was standing up for allowing us to take ownership of our future instead of being held hostage to everything in my father's past that made him the way he was.

Today, on the other chronological side of that epic struggle between my parents, my mother and grandparents rest in peace at a cemetery not far from where I live. They each lived long enough to see that the triumph of their legacy over my father’s gracelessness was total.

My unmarried man's soliloquy: circa January 2010 (told from a second person point of view):

You are the proverbial last leaf on a tree. The most recent of your straight single friends to marry was five years ago. You are on the less glamorous side of the over and under so far as the age 30 line goes and you are starting to creep closer to the big Four Oh. The blizzard of bachelor, rehearsal dinner, and wedding party invitations you received in the mail in your mid twenties is far enough in the past that for all you know announcements to these functions are now delivered through evites.

You used to scoff at the parade of your woman friends and ex-girlfriends who said you had commitment issues. It sounded like an uninformed Bronx cheer to you. “If you dated some of these mentally unbalanced women I’ve been with in my life, you wouldn’t have gotten married either” was your utterly confident and more than a little smug retort to them. The line had the benefit of being convenient and true at the same time. In your dating history you unintentionally attracted more than your share of women with bipolar and borderline personality disorder and once even multiple personality disorder issues. So that was the true part. The convenient part was you could just keep dating and dating and dating and you didn’t have to face the hard choices that come with commitment.

Until you met her. The person you are with now. She is a wonderful, kind hearted, and generous person. She actually loves you for the real you, not some distorted impression of you. You know she is more than you deserve. You love her back and more than that, you can honestly say you are actually in love with her. And she is not in any way crazy. The obliteration of your old excuse unsettles you. Why do you hesitate to give her what she has told you she wants? The other evening you both went to a bar with friends and she wound up drinking too much. By the end of the night her voice was slurred as she started asking you if you really love her and if you did, why wouldn’t you marry her? Great, every long in the tooth bachelor’s idea of a good time: arguing with their drunk girlfriend about why they haven’t gotten married yet.

But deep down inside, you know that you should. And you know if you don’t, if you let let this girl slip away, you will end up living a life filled with “what ifs” and “why didn’t I’s” and the only thing you will be able to respond with is an endless march of variations on I could have, I would have, I should have.

So there you are. And there she is. All you have to do is reach.

Postscript:

In 2011, I reached.

Dream dealin'

My mom dying before my father was not supposed to be part of the Deal. In fact, if the Deal I made with my parents four years before she died had spelled out its particular chronological order of death and life events, I may never have signed on its metaphorical dotted line.

The Deal. The Deal was a bargain I struck with my mom and dad when I was 34 years old and after I had lived independently away from the family home since age 17. The centerpiece of the Deal was that I and my elderly parents would move in together and live under the same roof, with me paying on a roughly 4:1 dollar basis the majority of the rent on the house we shared as well as all other routine living expenses. For her part of the Deal, my mom assumed responsibility for requisitioning and cooking the household food, washing and ironing our collective laundry, and maintaining the environmental order of our family home. To the day that she died my mom completed her end of our Deal with the same maternal grace and love she had exemplified her whole life.

For me, this living and budgetary arrangement between me and my parents was a Deal, but to my mother it was her Dream. From the time my two brothers and I were born my mom had cherished the hope that one or two or all three of us would grow up to be adult sons with whom she would live under the same roof for the full length of her old age. The diametric opposite of the historically American cultural ethic wherein adult children are supposed to permanently leave the family “nest” at age 18 and never look back, Mom’s dream was rooted in the history of our immigrant family and culture. In the Peru of the 1930s and ‘40s, where she had been born and raised, multigenerational households were nearly universal. Nothing was more alien to my mother’s rural Peruvian mindset than families that scattered to the four winds as their respective children, having grown to young adulthood, made their separate ways into disparate homes located in distant cities.

My mom maintained this defining cultural ethos her entire life. Even after having lived in the United States for over 35 years, Mom’s dream remained the same: familia unido por siempre, united family always. Mom’s ideal remained the same despite the inevitable accommodations and adaptations that her own six younger adult brothers and sisters made as they navigated the acculturation challenges that comprised the modern American backdrop against which they lived their respective lives away from their own parents, my grandparents Nona and Papasito.

In her own life my mom was not immune to the winds of change. She allowed the presence of my father in our multigenerational family household to contribute to the decision my maternal grandparents eventually made to move away from the old Lake Avenue house when I was 13 and after my mom had turned 51. Despite this, the fact that my mom and her parents lived together until my mom surpassed the half century mark of her life was the most natural thing imaginable to her mind. The only thing disconcerting to her about this fact was that her parents ever felt compelled to live away from her in the first place. Sixteen years later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother Nona was widowed, my mom’s first and truest instinct was for Nona to come live with her. This proved to not be possible at the time but it was an unfortunate convergence of fact and circumstance that my mother told me years later she always regretted.

I was 11 when the existence of my mother’s Dream first hit me. I remember her and I riding alone together in our family’s old beat up 1972 Toyota station wagon on an otherwise unremarkable sunny weekday afternoon when my mother turned to me from the driver’s seat and said forcefully that in the distant future I was to “never, ever, never” place her in an “old people’s home.” Failure to preempt her placement in a nursing home, she said emphatically in Spanish, would result in her personally wringing my neck. I remember nodding my head at her, as if I really understood what she was talking about but the whole notion of my mother ever growing old and the question of how I would care for her when that time came was more than my sixth grader’s mind could grasp. My prepubescent mind was still locked in on things like G.I. Joe cartoons, Three Stooges reruns, and the wide world adventures of Tintin and his dog Snowy. However, since my memory of this moment survived the three interceding decades, I can safely say that she succeeded in establishing just how neck bone creakingly important this issue was to her.

All of six years after our mother-son conversation in the station wagon, as I prepared to graduate from high school my main goal in life had become to leave the family home and never live there again. For reasons directly related to my stressed relationship with my father, I had decided I would not live at home with my parents one second longer than I had to. To facilitate this goal I became the only graduating senior from my entire high school class who, having been accepted at a four year college for a fall semester entrance the following September, enlisted in the military reserves for six years. Several classmates asked me at the time why I enlisted. I never told any one who actually placed the question to me that the single decisive factor for me was to avoid having to spend even one last summer at home with my father, from whom I felt an estrangement too profound to capture in words.

In the years that lapsed between 1990 and 2006 my mother respected my decision to move away even as she clearly regretted that I had done so. Several times she let her frustration show at my dogged determination to live on my own as she asked me outright why I didn’t “want” to live with “her.” I never mobilized the honesty to tell her that to live with her meant my dad would be included in the deal and that the prospect of living with my father was practically radioactive to me. So, in those intervening years I visited my parents as often as I could, sent Mom spending money when the need arose, and otherwise contented myself with living an independent bachelor lifestyle.

Contentment remained true until May 2006, when my father was diagnosed with liver cirhossis. Dad’s cirhossis came on so suddenly that my parents were caught completely off guard and at first mistakenly believed he had terminal liver cancer. By 2006 Mom and Dad had both worked at the same lamp assembly factory for twenty years, very happily reporting there every work day to perform precision based manual labor, despite being seventysomethings. That is until, as the saying goes, the day the music stopped. My father’s newly diagnosed liver condition meant he had to take immediate medical retirement. My mother, as his primary caregiver, also had to retire, since my father would be requiring daily care and supervision from her.

Their unexpected medical retirement meant a significant reduction in household income, as the Social Security checks they were eligible to draw could not come close to equaling what they had earned at the lamp factory. Mom had the budget nailed down to a cent and she knew there was no realistic way they could live long term in the detached single family three bedroom house they rented with only their Social Security retirement income. I knew this too, and since my roommate was coincidentally getting married during this same time frame and I would be needing to transition in to a new place of my own, the germ of the Deal was born.

“Six months”, I told my mother, on the day I moved my belongings into the family home. “I will help you for six months and then I will find a new place closer to my job and move there.” My mom remained silent in response, as she watched me in happy disbelief while I marched taped up box after taped up box in to my new bedroom in her house, me doing my best to assert the end term of the Deal and her preferring to play out the string that would signify the resurrection of a maternal dream deferred.

Six months lapsed into four years because dreams are more compelling than deals, especially when those dreams involve your beloved mother. But through all this, one permanently unspoken assumption was the driving force behind the Deal: that my physically robust, mentally razor sharp, energetically whirling 72 year old Energizer bunny of a mom would not merely survive but decisively outlive by an incalculable lot my physically frail, easily disoriented, perpetually doddering, cirrhotic liver equipped 76 year old father. The catastrophic worst case scenario that would be the reverse chronological sequence——my mother dying well before my father—was never uttered by her and I, never contemplated by me personally, and not so much as imagined by a soul in our family.

Catastrophe and reality collided on the morning of March 9, 2010. On that beautiful early spring Tuesday, my mom experienced a piercing head ache that caused her to stand up from the kitchen table where she had been having breakfast with my father. She walked into the family living room, sat down on the sofa to try to compose herself, and within minutes suffered a powerful cerebral aneurysm that in turn precipitated a massive stroke. She died the next day.

My mother’s Dream was completed, as she had lived at home with one of her adult sons in to the full length of her old age, just as she always wanted. But for me the Deal was not even close to over and had in fact become completely inverted, because she left me and my father stranded alone together in what suddenly felt like the emptiest house in the entire world, lost at sea in our shock and grief without the anchor of our lives.

With my mother gone forever, it was emphatically now my turn to care for my traumatized 79 year old father and somehow, some way, survive a footnote to the Deal that I had never even considered when I first agreed to it: that Mr. Death had held the real playing cards all along and nothing I planned for, thought about, or believed in could trump the ace of irony it had now flung in my face.

Of moms and memories

Among the earliest conscious memories I have of my mother involved my first late night jail break. Bedroom break is a more literal way to describe what happened but the effect was the same: one late night at age five I had escaped the confines of the bedroom that I shared with my younger brother and mom and thus found myself enjoying the forbidden freedom of staying up several hours past my Mom-decreed bed time. Unfortunately, on this particular late evening my mother came home unexpectedly early from her night time shift and found me wide awake and sunk deeply into the contours of a sofa tucked against the wall of our darkened living room. There I sat, nestled obliviously and quietly between my two grandparents, Nona and Papasito, who were then in their sixties and timelessly ancient to me in a Treebeard sort of way.

On this bedroom break evening the television set my grandparents and I gazed upon was projecting pastel 1970s images and a mono stereo Spanish language blare that engulfed the living room with a silver electronic glow and an acoustically dull din that were as mysteriously vibrant to me as any cave man’s fire from prehistoric times. I sat staring so intently at the television’s flickering blur that by the time my mom burst in to the living room I had no time to think of flashing an escaped fugitive’s dash for a likely looking hidden corner. “Get up!!” my mother hissed at me in Dolby Digital surround sound quality Spanish. The tone of her voice and the emphatic body language she used revealed a maternal anger I had rarely heard or seen from her. “Go to bed!” she yelled more forcefully as she gesticulated in the direction of the bedroom. “You know you have school in the morning and you know you’re not supposed to be up this late!”

I blasted off from the living room couch, zooming past her as fast as my child’s adrenaline filled legs could carry me, and burst in to the darkness of the hall way behind her. As I did so I simultaneously hoped to avoid a pulled ear or a pinched arm or a slapped noggin courtesy of my justifiably ticked off mom even as I rued how so few secrets could ever be kept from my mother for long. Still just a kindergartner I was already learning from direct experience the universal truth that a good mother and the survival of her child’s flimsy secrets no more go together in Real Life than a cascade of otherwise delicious ketchup poured over a stack of pristine IHOP restaurant flapjacks.

A good mother. In my entire life I do not remember that my mom ever used those two words in tandem to characterize herself. This is not all that personally surprising to me as she was an eminently modest person: humble to a fault. My mother was neither a perfect mom nor a perfect person and yet her actions over the course of my life testified to the authentically best kind of mom that she really was. I will consider myself lucky if my written words in this or any future electronic space can capture a small fraction of the intangible qualities that defined my mom’s character and distilled her Mom-ness.

By the year that she died I had long since convinced myself that in a hypothetical Battle of the Chefs my mom could cook any erstwhile competing chef on the planet right under the table. She daily concocted an aromatic Peruvian cuisine that I grew up wishing I could somehow commercialize into the world’s finest T.V. dinners, a feat that by age 16 I was sure would set our impoverished family on the path to billions. But my mother did not start out so gastronomically accomplished. From her teen age years onwards she had been a working woman and until she turned 51 she had largely left the household cooking details to her own mother, my grandmother Nona. Embedded in this fact was the reality that my mom and Nona lived together under the same roof for over half of what turned out to be the total length of my mom’s life.

Living with different generations in the same house defined my upbringing and formed the gravitational laws governing the many orbits of the world I grew up to call Brownotopia. As a practical matter, however, having my grandparents available to watch over me and my younger brother day and night also enabled my mom to work the jobs and attendant work shifts necessary for our family to economically scrape by just long enough to make it to her next biweekly paycheck.

Looking back on those early first years after our arrival in California, I recognize how materially poor our family really was and how my mom struggled day and night to provide for us. We never lacked for food or clothes or a roof but beyond these necessities nothing else rated a slam dunk as a guaranteed given. A certain summer time recreational activity me and my little brother Edwin participated in can perhaps illustrate this point.

The old Lake Avenue house that we grew up in was not air conditioned and turned furnace levels of hot under the Southern California summer sun. To cool ourselves off, unlike some of my Pasadena area cousins, who seemed to have innumerable bevies of goodies including the super fun and super unaffordable Slip N’ Slide and even actual backyard swimming pools, all we had at our old house was a beat up sprinkler that still (mostly) worked when connected to its leaky decrepit front lawn faucet. One long summer, in addition to not having a Slip N’ Slide, me and my brother, then aged seven and five respectively, also did not have actual swimming trunks that fit, as my mom had no money to buy us any.

Not yet old enough to know any better, anxious not to waste precious sun drenched hot afternoons, and no swimming trunks notwithstanding, we regularly cranked up the old leaky faucet anyway, stripped ourselves down to our low cut Superman and Captain America Underoos (which were as near full monty style threaded fabric as could cling on to the fannies of little boys) and for hours happily took turns jumping through the sprinkler on a sloping front lawn directly facing four lanes of opposing traffic carrying hundreds of cars, trucks, and pedestrians.

Even at this young age, while joyously pretending the feeble splashed sprinkler water to be Malibu class ocean waves, we noticed adults with astonished looks on their faces staring at us from inside their cars. We also noticed they talked to each other while pointing at us. Edwin and I were just old enough to be a little self conscious about the stares and pointing but young enough to not let that self consciousness stop us for even one second from frog jumping endlessly over the muddy crab grass and sprinkler water in our clingy Underoos.

The first job that I remember my mom having was a night shift position at a film processing company in Glendale. My grandparents always regretted that my mom needed to work a night shift job. “Pobresita tu madre” [your poor mom] is what Nona and Papasito would frequently sigh as they reflected in Spanish on the long overnight hours my mom put in to make a living. During the many occasions Nona called me out on my various boyhood transgressions and chore completion screw ups, she frequently reminded me how hard and how long my mom had to work “de noche” (Spanish for at night) in order to provide for us and how this needed to motivate me to behave better. In reality, I only had the dimmest of understandings regarding what my mom had to undergo to provide for us. By age 6 all I really know was that her job took her out of the house a lot and when I was awake in the day she often had to be sleeping to rest up for her night shift.

So naturally I was thrilled one evening when I found myself in the kitchen and overheard my mom speaking anxiously in to the family’s rotary phone as the news was broken to her that the film processing company she worked at was shutting down and that she’d just lost her job. Now Mom’s going to be home all day!! I remember thinking joyously. Hooray!

Of course, in the weeks and months that followed there was no economic hooray for my Mom. Blocky government cheese (which was actually rather tasty) became a staple of our daily diet. During super market trips I saw my mom pull out food stamps to pay for groceries and at doctor’s visits my Mom pulled out the Medi-Cal cards with the little removable green stickers in order to pay for our medical appointments. The old Lake Avenue house, with its chipped white paint and falling shingles, looked more forlorn than ever and should trails of ants march in to a pot of boiled dinner broth, as several times they would in those months, Nona refused to throw out the resulting ant and vegetable soup and insisted on serving this hybrid brew to our stomach turned kid palates, saying the “protein” was good for us.

One enduring constant that my mother and grandmother modeled to us through this economic crisis and so much more that was to come our way in life was their Christian faith. Every Sunday morning during my grade school years Mom and Nona loaded me and Edwin in to my Mom’s old blue 1962 Plymouth Valiant. In those pre seat belt law days, Edwin and I would then scrunch ourselves against the car floor to listen to the gravelly asphalt of the road whiz by below us as the Valiant whooshed its way toward a first generation immigrant Latino church in far away Los Angeles that was ministered to by a man named Pastor Brady.

Pastor Brady’s church was huge. The pews me and Edwin sat on lifted us so far up off the floor that that our feet dangled in the air, not touching the carpet underneath. At every service Pastor Brady would call for an offering, saying to the congregation that the offering (ofrenda in Spanish) was “for God” and that God would “count” every penny of every dollar given to Him. I saw that my mom and Nona gave money at every service they attended and that their brows would furl in deep concentration as they prayed for a blessing on the day’s ofrenda. Deeply impressed by Pastor Brady’s pronouncements, I also closely observed how and when the offerings were passed by the church ushers around the pews inside woven baskets with long handles. I noted that after the ushers took the offering baskets to the church foyer behind the sanctuary, they then entered a door opening to a steep flight of stairs leading skywards. I always wanted to follow the ushers up those stairs because I just knew that on the second floor they met up with an angel who would literally count and collect the weekly offering. I was positive the ushers met with an angel because I was quite sure God Himself was too busy to go to every church on the planet to collect offerings in person. Several times I considered telling Mom my theory about how the “ofrendas” made their way to Heaven but I held back, thinking she probably already knew this herself.

For my mom and Nona faith was not just lived out on Sundays. Every night at home they gathered me and Edwin to the master bedroom, turned off the lights, and with all of us kneeling along the edges of the large bed, they led us in taking turns earnestly praying to God in Spanish, thanking Him for the blessings in our lives and asking for His grace in having my Mom find a new job, curing my grandparents of their arthritis, helping me with math, and meeting any other pressing need that we could think of. Both Mom and Nona prayed with conviction and humility, modeling to me and Edwin a defiantly vibrant faith, the light of which illuminated their lives and guided them through the tempest of joblessness that my Mom had to navigate for the time being and which was destined to see us all through more painful crucibles in the then unknowable future. The light from their maternal faith burns through the mists of the interceding years to remind me what my mother and her mother held closest to their hearts in teaching us how to struggle, how to endure, and how to prevail.

Reanimating remembered reimaginings

The living room walls of the old Lake Avenue house that I grew up in featured wallpaper depicting hundreds of little yellow flowers splayed against a white background. Having not seen similar flowery wall paper in a house since those hazy childhood years, I imagine the style would probably not be considered fashionable in the 21st century. However, I am not a hundred percent sure, because as a garden variety issue bachelor, I am convinced that I am congenitally incapable of competent discernment in the realm of interior decorating style and design.

In any case, the Lake Avenue living room was more notable to my childhood self for its its distinctive brown furry carpet as opposed to its botanically bedecked walls. Given prevailing 1970s standards, the living room carpet strands were not quite shag style but in 2010 they would have definitely stood out for their stringy length and the fact that they collectively featured the darkest shade of brown that you can imagine visualizing in carpet form.

As a six year old boy I loved that old carpet for one principal reason. This was due to how I mentally repurposed a visible permanent crease that ran down the expansive carpet’s full length. The crease was a visual legacy effect from when this dark brown expanse of collective fiber threads had been folded precisely in half during its time in retail storage. The two indentations forming the outline of the dividing crease were some six inches wide and over fifteen feet long. The crease was so pronounced that it was visible to the naked eye from any vantage point in the living room.

To my six year old mind, these defining features made the carpet crease absolute perfection because its dimensions served as the ideal fascimile for the Death Star trench from the movie Star Wars. This mental repurposing illustrates the depths to which my young child’s imagination had to compensate for my family's lack of money to buy me toys that came out of actual boxes (a la genuine Star Wars action figures).

Imagination. Margery Williams Bianco, the author of classic children’s books like Velveteen Rabbit and Poor Cecco, once said that imagination is simply another word for the interpretation of life. Since a child’s play is itself nothing but imagination in motion, then you could say that as a little kid I assigned a very aerodynamic form factor to my interpretation of life.

This is because in lieu of playing with store bought plastic toys, the following is what I did for days and evenings on end: while hopping and ducking over the living room crease cum reimagined Death Star trench, I balled up my left hand into a tight fist with the thumb sticking out to simulate a Tie fighter, flattened my palm straight with the right hand to represent an X-wing fighter, and then proceeded to repeatedly reenact the climactic final Death Star battle over and over again. I also provided my own personal soundtrack as I very loudly hummed the Star Wars orchestral theme and shrieked the simulated sounds of roaring star fighter engines, blazing laser cannons, the screams of doomed Rebel and Imperial pilots corkscrewing their respective ways into fiery oblivion, and the resulting exploded space ship debris.

I played this decidedly abstract version of Star Wars with a young boy's ferocity and while I am sure I must have looked quite bizarre to my mom and grandparents as I excitedly crouched and hopped all over the middle of the living room and flailed my balled up fist and open palm in inexplicable gyrations, to their credit, they never thought I belonged in a "sitio de locos" (insane asylum). Well, if they did, at least they were nice enough to never tell me.

In fact, my mom may have actually felt sorry for me because poor as we were—and our branch of the family cornered the market on the poor church mice category in those years—she did manage to send me and Edwin to see The Empire Strikes Back over five times when that iconic film had its theatrical release in 1980. Five trips to the same movie meant she shelled out some twenty five dollars in about a two month time span for us to see Empire. Twenty five bucks represented a small fortune to our family in those years, a fact that I was more than a little aware of even then. I have always been grateful to my mom for having understood how personally and monumentally important this sci-fi sliver of American pop culture was to me.

Growing up it wasn’t only about space opera talismans for me though. One day around Christmas time, when I was about seven, my mom bought me and Edwin two stuffed animal toys from the local super market, a soft brown teddy bear for me that I imaginitively enough christened “Teddy” and a tanned and luxuriously tailed stuffed squirrel that Edwin designated “Squirrely.” Teddy sported a cashmere soft black cloth, had two shiny plastic balls for eyes, and he was exactly the right size and weight of an archetypal teddy bear. He quickly became my all time favorite toy.

One day soon after my mom had brought us our stuffed animals, during an especially rowdy round of BOOM! BANG! style sibling wrestling encounters, I ill advisedly assaulted Edwin’s “Squirelly”. In a fit of sibing pique, I manhandeld Squirelly until its upright tail became mostly detached and hung back off of him like a very loosely attached appendage. Screeching a vow of revenge Edwin, in retaliation, “bearnapped” defenseless Teddy and then repeatedly slammed him by his stubby legs against a long vanity mirror hanging in the house until Teddy’s plastic button-like nose flew right off. Distressed at this turn of events, I abruptly stopped our not so brotherly play and took my wounded friend directly to my mom. She performed emergency surgery on Teddy by promptly sewing a new nose for him. Teddy’s surgically replaced proboscis was a square brown patch made from an old pair of courdory pants that I had recently outgrown. Teddy was again good to go.

At some point early in our time in each other’s lives, I decided to accessorize Teddy because I wanted to him look both unique and uniquely mine. I outfitted him with a rather fluffy pink yarn strand that was tied all the way around his neck. This pink collar had the effect of making Teddy more distinctive but also unintentionally incurred the risk factor of making him, in my child’s line of reasoning, more “girly.” I remember thinking that since it wouldn’t do to have him be overly wimpy, and since I most definitely imagined him as a “boy” bear, I needed to counterbalance the whimsically shaded collar I had secured for him.

So I rummaged through my existing collection of toys until I found a battle ship made out of grey die cast metal. This war like toy became Teddy’s own talisman: a transitional object of sorts, that I decreed Teddy would carry with him everywhere that he went, to show what a “tough” bear he was, pink collar notwithstanding. To rationalize why Teddy always carried his totem with him, I further decreed by order of the Imagination Sheriff (me) that the battleship was made out of honey, sort of like a freeze dried apricot, and that this vessel was Teddy’s “honey battleship.” The logic completely breaks down here, of course, because there is no real life equivalent for a vat of honey dehydrated into a toy battleship’s form factor, but whatever. I was seven years old, so the yin yang symbolism of a pink collar and a grey battleship for my beloved stuffed bear canceling each other out was sufficiently sensical for my second grade self, illogical to the rest of the world or not.

Teddy and me were good friends. He sat by me while we played forts with my brother. Unlike seemingly every adult in my life, he never yelled at me for being bad at math. He faithfully slept next to me every evening and late at night I would whisper a young boy’s secrets into his ears, while he silently listened and took all that in. Hours after I should have been sound asleep, I would gaze out the bedroom window towards the Pasadena night time skyline with a pair of binoculars that I had “temporarily relocated” from my grandpop’s stash of Cool Stuff he kept by his bed. I scanned the sky for many long minutes at a time, hoping to spot a stray UFO space ship so that I could report to Teddy that, yes, there was alien life Out There, floating just above us. The UFO flying saucers never did fly by across the view from my bedroom window, but Teddy humored me just the same, waiting patiently until my eye lids grew heavy and I stumbled back into bed by his side and down under the covers. In my memory of him now, as in how I experienced him then, he was a really cool bear......as cool a bear as a kid ever befriended, and as real a toy as a boy ever imagined.

Priestly Proteus

My family’s history demonstrates that a veneer of walking human irony wrapped in flowing black cloth can transmit life in more ways than one. Four generations ago a fair skinned Roman Catholic priest, a Spaniard who had recently made the epic transatlantic sojourn from Espana to darkest Peru by ship, arrived at a northern Peruvian federal district called La Libertad. He journeyed all this distance so he could minister to the pious local populace. This priest’s name was Benjamin Taboada and the fact that he is my great great grandfather and that he sired great great grandchildren from at least ten different matriarchal lines is all the evidence an amateur family genealogist requires in order to understand that old Padre Benjamin had, as it were, peculiarly literal notions about how to spread the seed of his pastoral outreach.

How did the all too literally titled Padre Benjamin go about this? Maybe it was the authoritative black cloth he sported or the extended gaze of his celebrated blue eyes in a society tragically subservient to the notion that blue eyes and fair skin are necessarily the epitome of human beauty. Perhaps it was the exotic cluck of his guttural Castilian accent. Possibly the sheer mental acuity that is required of any classically trained Roman Catholic priest combined with a wanton recklessness that was specifically part of his moral DNA helped to make him such a perversely successful Lothario. Most likely a convergence of different such factors cumulatively left it so that Padre Benjamin experienced little difficulty in intellectually seducing and physically bedding many provincial and naive young women in the sundry hamlets that dot La Libertad.

At the geographical epicenter of La Libertad is my family’s ancestral hamlet Paranday. My father’s bloodline traces its way multiple generations into the past through Paranday’s outskirts until antiquity’s mists permanently obscure the named identities of my forebears. Paranday is just one of the isolated villages in the region at large where my priestly ancestor lived out one of those subversively ironic examples from real life that illustrate the way nomenclature can pun itself silly: for indeed “Padre” Benjamin left a minor galaxy of padre-less runts in his genetic wake.

Notably, Benjamin did not move into the homes of any of the female parishioners with whom he became physically intimate to play either the official or unofficial role of a husband, father, or titular head of household. The reasons for this were three fold and interconnected. One was due to the sheer number of liaisons Benjamin carried on simultaneously. Two, all other things being equal, a priest from this time could survive many unpriestly personal faults and foibles, but no priest could become legally married and still remain a priest. Three, Benjamin’s renegade local priest status notwithstanding, his ministerial mandate was to run the parish circuit of his day. In other words, since the provincial Catholic parishes were so miniscule in the size of their congregations and so physically spread out over a dispersed geographical area, this meant no individual local parish among them could retain the services of a full time priest. Thus Benjamin was required to travel an infinite loop of different parishes every two to three days at a time in order to discharge his more conventional priestly duties before he would again be on the road in donkey powered transit to another distant hamlet’s church. If anything, this itinerant life style helped facilitate for Benjamin the Don Juan alter ego that he pursued so notoriously.

The notoriety piece puzzled me some ninety years later as I would quiz my by now elderly parents regarding how Benjamin got away with his proto-Wilt Chamberlain lifestyle (well, proto-Wilt Chamberlain for an ordained priest anyway). “Why didn’t the Church catch on and bust him for having all these babies with all these women?” I bewilderedly asked. My parents maintained that the local auxiliary bishop sinverguenzas (Spanish for shameless ones) in the regional capital city of Trujillo and federal capital Lima surely knew of Benjamin’s sexual shenanigans, but systematically looked the other way.

My parents claimed that “el Vaticano” itself would “probably” have taken some punitive action if properly apprised of Benjamin’s Priests Gone Wild routine, but back then “there was no such things as phones or faxes” to expeditiously send word back across the Atlantic Ocean to the Vatican vicars of what was happening in geographical boondocks like La Libertad. Besides, my parents added, Benjamin was not the only such rogue priest in the frontier hinterlands. Rascally minded and acting priests apparently abounded in the region at large and together they constituted an old padre network that protected its members from any sort of organized backlash for their decidedly unchaste misdeeds up and down the Andean countryside.

“Church prerogative”, my father answered when I commented to him that it still felt as if Benjamin had taken the word brazen to an absurdly comic level. Priests back then, my dad elaborated, were held in such high local esteem that they were referred to as “Doctor” at least as often as “Padre” by deferential village believers. In addition, he added, the Church at this time owned large lots of land in the countryside. Catholic clergy leveraged this land wealth in ways that helped them maintain their power and prestige. My father surmised that most likely old Benjamin supported a good number of his pious paramours with the granting of minor land grants from larger Church property lots that allowed these single mothers to maintain a measure of subsistence living for themselves and their children.

So Benjamin, who died around the year 1920, lived out a long life in La Libertad as an unchaste priest. In so doing it came to be that my dad’s grandfather Eliseo Taboada and his nine locally known half brothers and sisters sprinkled throughout different villages in La Libertad like so many cherries in a pitcher of sangria, were raised by their respective mothers without a real father’s presence in their lives. Fatherlessness was the prevailing legacy of the moment and it was into fatherlessness that Eliseo marched through the provincial childhood of his day. As future writings will show, fatherlessness was destined to be a recurrent fact of life for the next next three family generations.

Rodney's renditions

The most demonstrative and unabashed classical music aficionado I have known in my life was coincidentally the only boogeyman I met face to face as a child. Or, at least “boogeyman” was the immediate impression that registered in my six year old mind the day our paths unexpectedly crossed. Sharing with me the exact same initial experience and the same resulting reaction were my four year old brother Edwin, and my cousin Vicky, then 8. This distinct impression resulted from the circumstances of the very first time we all four unexpectedly found ourselves in the same room.

The day we learned of each other’s existence our family had just recently decided to rent a battered and decaying white Craftsman style house that at the time was already over 80 years old. This vintage residence was located in north central Pasadena on a street corner directly facing Lake Avenue. Lake was and still is one of the most congested roads in the entire San Gabriel Valley. Four lanes of highway running north and south containing hundreds of zooming cars, belching buses, and thundering trucks rattled past that old dwelling day and night. But that fateful Boogeyman Encounter Day we three---me, Edwin, and Vicky---were so far inside the house that the sounds of Lake Avenue were nothing but a soft and distant din.

Having briefly escaped the family adults on this sunny afternoon and today being our first time actually inside this empty old structure that our family had not even moved into yet, the three of us set about exploring together its many drafty rooms. We were peering through windows looking out onto a side street from the master bedroom when suddenly we heard loud, fast moving footsteps rush up from our rear. Completely surprised, we spun around to see that a strange looking man with pale skin and wild blue eyes was suddenly standing behind us, a baleful and utterly intent glare on his face. He stood there for a long several seconds, seeming to tower over us, the very incarnation of a child’s mythological boogeyman. He then bellowed something that might not have been an actual word and proceeded to feverishly unbuckle his belt, as if to take the belt off of his pants.

Scared out of our collective minds, and instantaneously dreading that this terrifying stranger was going to whip us with his even more terrifying belt, we three let out a feral group scream worthy of a horror movie and burst into tears in virtually the same breath. The strange man stopped unbuckling his belt and continued looking at us for several more seconds. He then wheeled right around and rocketed out of the bedroom and the house through the front door as quickly as he had surprised us.

At least several minutes passed before we collected ourselves enough to stop crying. We then tumbled out of the bedroom and made our way to the kitchen area at the far rear of the house to tell my mom, who was cleaning out the wash sink, and who had heard none of the commotion in the other part of the house, about “el hombre” we had just encountered. She continued to scrub the sink as she listened calmly to the encounter we excitedly described to her. Her measured response helped us to catch our breath. She told us to keep the front door locked and not to worry. Her display of Mom coolness settled us down and the rest of that long ago afternoon passed by uneventfully.

Later the same evening, after making a few inquiries in that seemingly invisible way that adults do which can be so mysterious to young children, my mom identified the intruder to us as Rodney, the grown son of a white haired old lady, both of whom lived in the small house right next to the one we were moving into. We were not to worry, she told us. Rodney, who had not realized there was a family moving next door, now knew not to go through the front door of our “new” old house without permission. Retroactive though the proper introduction to Rodney had been, I was reassured.

After we moved, as our family’s first days and weeks in the Lake Avenue house passed by, my initial boogeyman impression of Rodney completely changed. It turned out that Rodney was no boogeyman at all. Instead he was characterized to us by Nona and mom as an “enfermito”, a Spanish diminutive word approximately translating as “little sick one.” Rodney was intellectually impaired. He spoke incomplete sentences with a hard to understand slur, walked with an odd gait, and he stayed home all day with his elderly mom, neither going to work or school. He sported old fashioned Dickies pants, wore what I remember as button up plaid shirts, and he often nodded to himself as he walked. Because we played outside as much as we did, Edwin and I often observed him with his mother, entering and leaving their little house. The times that he saw us he bounced his head up and down, smiled, and waved at us, and we shyly waved back, the precipitous drama of our first surprise encounter in the past.

Looking back now, it is clear to me that Rodney had Down’s syndrome. Of course, at the time, in terms of clinical properties, I could not tell Down’s syndrome from Downey’s detergent. Still, Rodney was the first person with Down’s that I ever knew, and although it would be years before I actually learned what Down’s is as a human condition, I instinctively sensed that Rodney lived a completely different life than the one I myself would ever experience.

One particular feature about Rodney’s differentness stood out to my six year old self in a way that I never forgot. To me Rodney was different in that he embodied a certain kind of freedom. He embodied this freedom in a way I could not and did not. This freedom I refer to was the freedom to publicly and unabashedly express his passion and life interests to the world with not a care for what anyone personally thought of him or how he communicated those passions and interests. Because I did not see myself having or otherwise exercising this same freedom, Rodney’s doing so was a powerful assertion of individuality that I was fascinated to behold.

One way Rodney loved to express his individuality was through classical music. On any given sunny mid afternoon Rodney loved to park himself on the front lawn of his house, which faced Lake Avenue just like ours, stand tall on a makeshift podium, and proceed to offer to the whole flowing river of motorized and pedestrian humanity passing by him his best impersonation of a world class master symphony conductor giving a performance for the ages. To accomplish this bravura effect Rodney hauled out to his sloping front lawn twin giant stereo speakers that he pointed directly at Lake. He piled up next to those speakers large stacks of LP records featuring the greatest hits of classical composers like Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven. Rodney then clambered to the top of his improvised podium with a real conductor’s baton that he gripped in his pudgy right hand, and he proceeded to blast his classical music away at maximum decibel level while swaying his body back and forth to the music. As Rodney did so, he vigorously thrusted, jabbed, and whirled his conductor’s baton into the air, directing the violinists, flutists, cellists, oboists, and clarinet players that were visible only in his beautifully oblivious imagination.

Many times pedestrian onlookers huddled in front of Rodney’s improvised musical station to watch Rodney “conduct” his concert of the day. Rodney paid these onlookers no mind. He conducted his concerts with or without an immediate street audience, his face a virtual mask of pure concentration as he synchronized his body to the rise and fall of the musical notes blasting from his speakers. “Las payasadas de Rodney” my mom called it at the time. Rodney’s clown act, in Spanish. Every time she said this aloud, I silently disagreed.

Neither then nor now did I ever think of Rodney as being a clown when he stood on that podium to conduct his music. To me, all the times that I saw him direct his open air concerts, he embodied a living, breathing example of fearlessly, openly, and resolutely exercising the freedom to express one self no matter where, no matter when, no matter with whom, no matter even necessarily why. Rodney truly if unintentionally exemplified a freedom that I have spent the rest of my life trying to achieve for myself and to this day I am grateful to Rodney for this particular legacy he imprinted on my memory.